James Chanos Quotes

#1. Ever since her trip with Alexia to Scotland, Mrs. Tunstell had rather a taste for foreign travel. Alexia blamed it on the kilts.

Gail Carriger

#2. And so it can be very much in the interest of bank A to sell-short bank B shares, or buy CDSes on bank B, because they have exposure to bank B. It's the responsible thing to do as a fiduciary, and yet if everyone does it at the same time, it's destabilizing because everyone is selling.

James Chanos

#3. What people don't realize is that China papered over its last two credit bubbles, those in 1999 and 2004. The banks were never bailed out - they just exchanged their bad loans for questionable bonds from quasi-state organizations.

James Chanos

#4. The bigger the city is, the less infrastructure you need per capita.

Geoffrey West

#5. I've seen a lot more go to zero than infinity.

James Chanos

#6. Derivatives in and of themselves are not evil. There's nothing evil about how they're traded, how they're accounted for, and how they're financed, like any other financial instrument, if done properly.

James Chanos

#7. The investment we're all looking for is actually saving labor ... Look at what the internet is doing to retail.

James Chanos

#8. While short sellers probably will never be popular on Wall Street, they often are the ones wearing the white hats when it comes to looking for and identifying the bad guys!

James Chanos

#9. Did we make them
because we needed to love someone
and could not love each other?

Margaret Atwood

#10. I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!

Italo Calvino

#11. I call it the Rule of Three. If you read a company's financial statements three times, and you still can't figure out how they make their money, that's usually for a reason.

James Chanos

#12. Intuition: the feeling one knows something when one knows nothing.

Marty Rubin

#13. I feel like I don't have all the ingredients a person is supposed to have.

Jane Hamilton

#14. People who lose money always need someone to blame.

James Chanos

#15. The Macau casinos have a wonderful business, it's taking in money from Chinese businessmen elsewhere who send it through junky companies to casinos to gamble. The growth continues and they have basically western managers and western accounting, so we trust the numbers a little bit more.

James Chanos

#16. So you know, everyone points out Greece's default record, but the history of a lot of sovereign nations is not a good one when it comes to lending them money.

James Chanos

#17. What American people and what the markets want is a fair and level playing-field, where the rules are clearly elucidated, where the referees are competent, and where we know that the game is not rigged.

James Chanos

#18. The U.S. healthcare system is probably the most interesting large group of companies that are heading for major problems that we've seen in a long, long time.

James Chanos

#19. The Chinese banking system is built on quicksand and that's the one thing a lot of people don't realize. Everybody seems to think it is a free and clear open checkbook. It's not. The banking system in China is extremely fragile.

James Chanos

#20. Healthcare is growing now at about 10 per cent per annum in the U.S. top line, versus 3 per cent for the economy. As someone with a sharp pencil and an eye for this kind of thing, this can't last.

James Chanos

#21. Take away truth and people will lie. Scoff at virtue, and betrayal becomes a matter of course.

Frank E. Peretti

#22. I've learned there's a big difference between a long-focused value investor and a good short-seller. That difference is psychological and I think it falls into the realm of behavioral finance.

James Chanos

#23. It's almost sickening now that the regulators 'on the beat' while the biggest credit collapse in modern financial history unfolded are now patting themselves on the back for their 'brave' stance on short-selling!

James Chanos

#24. Increasingly, the real estate developers can't get bank loans for their project financing in China. They're now going into the Hong Kong market to raise money in the bond market at very, very high rates, as high as 15, 20 percent.

James Chanos

#25. In China, remember, the the banks are arms of state policy. They loan because the local party official or regional party official tells them we need a new stadium. They are instruments of state policy.

James Chanos

#26. Be smarter than others imagined.
Be braver than others anticipated.
Be stronger than others calculated.
Be better than others envisioned.

Matshona Dhliwayo

#27. I like comedy but I guess I don't think [my art] is that funny, either. It's too dark and a bit weird in places to be genuinely, uniformly hilarious and function as comedy.

David Shrigley

#28. It's very difficult in the technology space when you have been leapfrogged to prosper again.

James Chanos

#29. The marginal people on the trading desks, there's no skill set. If they don't trade derivatives, I don't know what they can do. The next stop is driving a cab.

James Chanos

#30. Homeopathy - an invention of the Father of Lies! I have tried it and found it wanting. I would swallow their whole doles' medicine chest for sixpence, and be sure of finding myself neither better nor worse for it.

Jane Welsh Carlyle

#31. Chinais a world class if not the world class property bubble, primarily high-rise buildings, offices and condos.

James Chanos

#32. Moderation consists in being moved as angels are moved.

Joseph Joubert

#33. Bubbles are best identified by credit excesses, not valuation excesses. And there's no bigger credit excess than in China.

James Chanos

#34. What we define as a bubble is any kind of debt-fueled asset inflation where the cash flow generated by the asset itself - a rental property, office building, condo - does not cover the debt incurred to buy the asset. So you depend on a greater fool, if you will, to come in and buy at a higher price.

James Chanos

#35. I'll always understand the Schadenfreude aspect to short-selling. I get that no one will always like it. I'm also convinced to the deepest part of my bones that short-selling plays the role of real-time financial watchdog. It's one of the few checks and balances in the market.

James Chanos